


The Strange Case of the Disappearing Explorer

by cordeliadelayne



Series: DCI Tom Ryan [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Canonical Character Death, Drama, F/M, Gen, Investigations, Light Angst, alternative universe, references to past dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:42:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24596212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordeliadelayne/pseuds/cordeliadelayne
Summary: Helen Cutter goes missing and DCI Tom Ryan and DS Stephen Hart are called in to investigate.
Relationships: Helen Cutter/Nick Cutter
Series: DCI Tom Ryan [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871158
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	The Strange Case of the Disappearing Explorer

The call came through at 10.30pm. Dr Helen Cutter, eminent explorer and wife of Professor Nick Cutter, noted palaeontologist, had gone missing from a dinner party hosted by Sir James Lester at his country house near the Forest of Dean. Given the eminence of all involved requests had been put in for discretion and expertise from the Home Secretary himself and so by 10.55pm Detective Chief Inspector Tom Ryan and Detective Sergeant Stephen Hart were loading their bags into a borrowed car and preparing for a long night.

“You know her, don't you?” Ryan asked as Stephen got into the passenger seat next to him.

Stephen paused infinitesimally before answering. “A little.”

“Define a little.”

Stephen stared out the window and took a few considering breaths. Ryan's patience was legendary in the Division, as was his tenacity.

“She was my supervisor,” Stephen finally replied, “a few years ago. That course I took at the British Museum on identifying shoe impressions.”

_“I must say, Stephen, you are not at all what I expected from a policeman.”_

“It was just six months, wasn't it?” Ryan asked, despite knowing perfectly well that it was. Stephen's high marks on the course were one of the reasons he'd first requested Stephen to join his division. “You don't feel the need to recuse yourself, then?”

_”My husband just doesn't understand me. Not the way you do.”_

“No reason at all,” Stephen said.

“Great. The Home Secretary sent over a file. Run through it aloud for me will you. I want all the background straight before we get there.”

Stephen reached for the file laid out on the back seat and pulled it open on his lap. It gave a precise run down of the people involved and a neat summation of the call that had brought them out so late.

“It'll take at least a couple of hours to get there,” Ryan said, pulling out of the driveway of the police station. “Well past midnight. I instructed everyone to be available for interview on arrival, but I won't hold my breath anybody complies. Least of all a bloody peer of the realm.”

Stephen silently agreed and started laying out the facts as presented by the Home Office.

“Dr Helen Cutter, explorer who rose to prominence after her one woman expedition to Borneo leading to her being presented to Queen Victoria. Had a very public falling out at the beginning of her career with Charles Darwin over differing approaches to the question of evolution. Her experience at tracking big cats has been employed by several police divisions around the world. Her public lectures are always over-subscribed. Praised for her intellectual standing. Married for six years to Nick Cutter. No children.”

“You ever meet him?”

_”This is Stephen, darling, one of my students.”_

“Briefly.”

Stephen flicked through to the précis of Cutter's life. “Professor Nick Cutter, senior lecturer in Palaeontology and Evolutionary Biology at Metropolitan University. Has written several tomes on fossils found around the United Kingdom and in the colonies. Vocal in his criticism of the portrayal of dinosaurs in the media, particularly the statues at Crystal Palace Park. Has a weekly column in _The Times_ aimed at refuting claims made by his colleagues in the academic world. Popular in the periodicals.”

“Do we know what happened tonight?” Ryan asked.

Stephen scanned the report. “Seems like Sir James had invited the Cutters and some others to his country home for the weekend. Rumour has it he wants to put together another expedition in South Africa looking for fossils to put in the new museum he's building in Kensington.”

Sir James Lester needed no introduction, being one of the wealthiest men in the country and a distant cousin to the King. He was considered a prickly character which is why he'd never stood for Parliament but he had taken a keen interest in recent scientific discoveries and provided funding for many institutions as well as individuals – including Helen Cutter's last two trips abroad.

“Do we have a list of who was there tonight?”

Stephen nodded. “Lester's assistant phoned it through. She's a Jenny Lewis, been with him since before his marriage and divorce. Abby Maitland, Head Keeper at Lester's private zoo within the grounds...”

“Tell me you're joking?” Ryan interrupted.

Stephen just grinned and carried on. “Connor Temple, Nick Cutter's research assistant. Jess Parker, Lester's ward and some sort of inventor. Hilary Becker, Head of Security – he has a valid gun licence by the way. And then various maids, cooks, etc. Apparently they'd all gone their separate ways after dinner and at some point realised Helen wasn't in the house. A search was begun but it was called off quite quickly, when we were called.”

“Grown woman who single-handedly faced down a jaguar in Paraguay goes for a walk on her own and a few hours later the police are called in? Doesn't exactly add up does it?”

Ryan looked over at Stephen who was fidgeting with the papers in his lap.

“Anything you want to add?”

“Add?” Stephen asked.

“Any impression you got about the state of the Cutter's marriage? Her general state of mind?”

_“You see I have needs that my husband just doesn't understand. But I think you do, don't you, Stephen?”_

“Nothing springs to mind,” Stephen said. “Cutter seemed happy enough whenever I saw him.”

“But not Helen?”

“That's not what I meant,” Stephen said. “I didn't know them well at all.”

Ryan hummed low to himself. “Yes, that's what you said.”

They drove in silence after that, each lost in their own thoughts until Ryan turned the car through large metal gates decorated with Lester's coat of arms and down a riverine drive that lead to a large squat house with several wings which were clearly not the original architect's idea.

“Maybe we're in luck,” Ryan said, indicating the front of the house where every available light appeared to be on, “and everyone stayed up to be interviewed after all.”

The time was 1.10am.

* * * *

They were greeted at the front door by an efficiently dressed woman who introduced herself as Jenny Lewis.

“You made better time than Sir James expected. He will be pleased. We've put you in the East Wing, adjoining rooms, I hope that's all right. Henderson will take your bags up if you just give him the keys. We were rather hoping we could get to bed and start afresh in the morning.”

As she'd been talking she'd lead them through an ornate hallway dominated by an overbearing glass chandelier and a large gilt edged staircase into what was obviously the library where the members of the household were gathered. It was all very reminiscent of the denouement of the cheap penny dreadfuls that Ryan refused to publicly acknowledge he consumed with a passion. A sombre man dressed all in black had removed him of his keys with as light a touch as any dipper.

“What are you doing about my wife?”

Nick Cutter, blond hair resembling a bird's nest, with his jacket and shirt looking like they'd spent not an inconsiderable amount of time inside a hedge, pushed his way towards Ryan and the only thing that stopped the obvious beginning of a tirade when was Jenny put a hand on his arm.

“Professor Cutter is understandably upset,” Jenny said.

“Yes,” Ryan agreed pleasantly. “However,” he made a show of consulting his watch, “she has only been unaccounted for for approximately three hours. If she were anybody else...”

“Well she isn't anybody else, she's my wife and I want her found. She was very up-” He stopped and flinched, almost as if Jenny's nails had dug into his wrist. Ryan filed the observation away for later.

“Let me introduce myself properly. DCI Ryan, this is Sergeant Hart. I believe you two have met before?”

Cutter turned, surprised, to give Stephen more than just the cursory look he'd given him on arrival.

_”He's very handsome, isn't he? Toned muscles have always been a weakness of yours, haven't they? You don't have to be coy with me, Nick, I know exactly what you like.”_

“I don't – you seem a little familiar,” Cutter said, unaccountably going a bit red in the face.

“I took one of Dr Cutter's classes on shoe print impressions,” Stephen said, shaking Cutter's hand.

_”He is handsome, isn't he Stephen? He can't satisfy me the way you can, but there is something about him that makes my heart beat faster. You understand that attraction, don't you Stephen?”_

Cutter nodded and blindly stepped back, straight onto the feet of the young man who'd been standing directly behind him. Ryan took the resultant confusion – apologies and calls for a first aid kit – as an opportunity to approach Lester who had been seated in a large wingback chair by the fire.

Lester raised an imperious eyebrow, then motioned for Ryan to sit in the chair opposite.

“Why did you call us in?” Ryan asked.

“Straight to the point, I see. Very well. There was some unpleasantness at dinner. Helen stormed out of the house. There was some concern that she might do away with herself.”

“My wife was many things, but she wasn't suicidal,” Cutter interjected.

“Was?” Ryan asked, softly.

“What? No, is, obviously, is,” Cutter said, flustered. “She still is my wife.”

A tense stillness settled across the room that Ryan was in no hurry to break. That all had not been well in the Cutter household for some time he could tell if only from Stephen's poor attempt at hiding his emotions, but quite what he was dealing with here – suicide or conspiracy to murder – he wasn't quite sure.

“What steps have you taken to find her?” Stephen asked, flipping open his notebook and pulling out his pencil.

Lester glanced at him once and then directed all his answers to Ryan. “My Head of Security formed a search party of the grounds with the staff and with Miss Abby Maitland, my zookeeper – I have a zoo on the premises and we were concerned about the possibility of wild animals being let loose. However as it was quite dark we gave up the job as a bad lot until first light. Myself and my guests confined ourselves to a search of the indoors but again, it seemed pointless until first light.”

“But not pointless enough to wait to call the police?” Stephen asked.

“As I mentioned, there was something of a scene at dinner. We thought it prudent for officers of the law to be at hand if necessary.”

“You weren't so much concerned about your animals getting loose as much as you were about Helen setting them loose?” Ryan surmised.

_”Perhaps humans should just take their chances. Let the animals roam free and then see who is really at the top of the food chain.”_

“That was one possibility,” Lester conceded.

“We've found something.”

Everyone turned to the door where a man, clearly the Head of Security if his military stance was anything to go by, if not his haircut, was holding up the headless body of a chicken, fresh blood dripping down his arm and onto the carpet.

The young man Cutter had stood on, identified by Stephen as Connor Temple, turned an interesting shade of green and half-lurched, half-fainted onto the rug in front of him.

The time was 1.50am.

* * * *

“It was right here,” Captain Becker explained, pointing down at the ground a few yards away from Lester's prize rose garden. The grass was littered with feathers and stained with blood. Stephen, who was kneeling on the ground, pressed his hand to the grass and came away with sticky wet fingers that he examined in the light of the torch Ryan was holding over him.

“Here, this should help.”

Jess Parker, dressed in a striking pink dress and green high heels tottered towards the lawn. She was carrying a large contraption followed by Abby, dressed in overalls and boots, carrying what she told them was a fully charged battery pack.

They watched curiously as Jess tinkered with the equipment until a full beam of light was produced where the chicken's corpse had been discovered. After a few more adjustments the beam shone out over the whole garden.

“Impressive,” Ryan said.

“Patent pending,” Jess said, smile as wide as the beam of light. “I could set up some more to help with the search?” she suggested. “Unless you think that will scare off whatever did that?” she added, turning to Abby who was now kneeling down next to Stephen.

“I don't see any animal tracks, do you?” Stephen asked.

Abby shook her head. “The chicken didn't look like it had been eaten, just decapitated. That's not usual for any of the wild cats we have in the zoo. Or any wild cat really. Most will kill for food, not for sport.”

“I hope you're not suggesting my wife was responsible for this?” Cutter demanded.

“I told you to stay inside,” Ryan reminded him amiably.

Cutter glared at him as Abby stood up.

“I think a creature did this,” she said. “I'm just not sure what.”

“Stephen, I want you and Miss Maitland to go with Captain Becker and do another sweep of the grounds, paying particular attention to the zoo. Armed with tranquillisers, if possible.”

“I have some locked in the shed,” Abby said, pointing to a nearby wooden structure.

“Good. Stay alert.” Ryan nodded at them as they jogged on their way. “Professor, inside, please. I want to talk to you about your wife.”

“I've told you everything...”

_“Sometimes I wish you were dead, Nick. Do you understand? Dead.”_

“Now, if you would,” Ryan said, steering Cutter inside. They bypassed the library where Lester's servants were laying out some food and coffee and settled instead for Lester's office.

“Can I get you a drink or anything?” Jenny asked.

“Some coffee would be great,” Ryan said as he sat down, Cutter sullenly following suit.

Jenny came back a few minutes later and patted Cutter comfortingly on the shoulder as she left. Cutter ignored his drink while Ryan took a sip and sighed contentedly – Sir James clearly had an appreciation for the finer things in life.

He took out his notebook and pencil and laid them on the arm of his chair, thinking over the questions he was going to ask and the conclusions he'd already drawn. Cutter's silence continued as Ryan was thinking about the equally difficult conversation he was going to have with Stephen before much more of the night was over.

Finally Cutter shifted in his seat, drank down his coffee in one long gulp and slapped his hands down on his knees.

“What do you want to know?”

“What really happened at dinner?”

_“You never listen to me, Nick. You aren't hearing what I'm telling you. My theories are valid.”_

“We had a disagreement,” Cutter said. “Lester was offering us a place on an expedition he's putting together for next year. Helen wanted to use it to test out some of her theories. I – I thought the money would be better spent on tangible science, not...”

“Pseudoscience?” Ryan asked, pulling up a phrase he'd read in a newspaper recently from the dregs of his memory.

“I wouldn't call it that.”

“But is that what Helen thought you were calling it?”

Cutter narrowed his eyes at Ryan suspiciously. “Maybe she had some, unusual, ideas about the evolution of certain animals. I won't bore you with the details. But her ideas are based purely on speculation and a wild interpretation of the scientific evidence. I couldn't just stay silent while she told Lester her theories as if they were fact.”

“Even though she was your wife?”

“Especially because she _is_ my wife,” Cutter said. “Intellectual integrity's important to us both. It's one of the reasons I love her. She challenges me like no one else.”

_“You embarrassed me tonight, Nick. That requires punishment. You know what that means, don't you? Strip.”_

“So you'd say on the whole your marriage is a happy one?”

“Of course,” Cutter said, far too quickly.

Ryan didn't comment but took a considering sip of his now lukewarm coffee.

“Inspector Ryan?” Jenny said, stepping quickly into the room. “Sgt. Hart would like to see you.”

Ryan didn't need to ask what they'd found, just like he didn't need to ask Jenny to stay with Cutter to make sure he stayed put. This was no longer a missing person's case.

The time was 2.30am.

* * * *

Helen Cutter's body was lying face up at the bottom of Lester's sculpture garden. Alabaster goddesses and water nymphs looked down on Stephen and Ryan as they squatted around the body. Her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, scratch marks covered her chest and arms and a large bite mark of some sort was healing above her left hip, visible where her shirt had ridden up away from her stomach.

“Abby took a look,” Stephen said, swallowing hard around a lump in his throat. “She couldn't identify the cause of the bite. Death seems to have been from an infection though – the bites inflamed -” He pointed a shaky finger at it then grabbed his hand away. “Abby think it looks a few week's old but that doesn't make sense because she's sure she didn't have it yesterday.”

“How can she be sure?”

“Helen's never been shy about undressing in public.”

“Anything else she wasn't shy about?” Ryan asked, pointedly.

Stephen stood up and turned towards Ryan. They hadn't been working together long but they'd immediately felt comfortable with each other and Stephen had progressed leaps and bounds under his careful tutelage. And Stephen hated lying, which was probably why he was so terrible at it.

_“Here's what's going to happen, Stephen. I tell you what to do and you do it. Now drop to your knees.”_

“It wasn't an affair, not really. I suppose – I suppose I just fell under her spell a bit. She could be very persuasive and I found myself doing things I'd never even heard of. Sexual things,” Stephen added, blushing profusely.

Ryan, who'd served in the army before joining the police and had therefore seen and done things he suspected would turn Stephen's head completely, just nodded solemnly and motioned for Stephen to carry on.

“She used to, she used to ask me to imagine myself – with her husband. Or him watching us. She'd bait me into doing things I wasn't comfortable with. Then she'd talk about her problems with Cutter.”

“How did it end?”

“I took Cutter's side,” Stephen said. They both turned to look towards the house. Thanks to Jess's network of lights they could see that Cutter was still being forcibly restrained from coming over by Captain Becker.

“How did you do that?”

“Helen started telling me her theories, and what Cutter thought about them. I don't have their science background of course, but I understood enough to know that Helen's ideas were, hell, they were crazy all right? All about evolutionary leaps that didn't make any sense – the fossil record is too new for her to be making the conclusions she had. Cutter thought so too.”

“And you told her so?”

Stephen rubbed at the back of his neck.

“ _I thought you were better than this Stephen, but you're just like all the rest. Pathetic. Get out.”_

“She threw me out, naked, into the street. I haven't dared show myself near her home since.”

“We'll need the police surgeon to confirm, but it is looking more and more like accidental, or indeed natural causes. Perhaps related to something she picked up on her travels.”

Stephen let out a deep breath. “That'll be a relief to Cutter.”

“You too, I expect,” Ryan said knowingly, but he was fairly sure Stephen wasn't ready for that revelation just yet.

“I should have told you from the beginning, I'm sorry. She just – I never knew which way was up when I was around her.”

“Some people get you like that. Keep important information from me again though and you'll be out so fast your feet won't hit the ground.”

Stephen nodded. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

“Come on. I need to talk to Cutter and you can call up the police surgeon. Then perhaps we can impose on Sir James' hospitality a little longer and get a few hours sleep.”

They walked companionably up towards the house. Jess and Connor were in an animated discussion about the lights and batteries as they approached, Abby watching, amused, from a bench under the library window.

“Thank you, Miss Parker,” Ryan said, “your invention has proven very useful. Perhaps just the light on the body can remain – Captain Becker and his men are going to stand watch for the rest of the night, or should that be morning?”

“Happy to help,” Jess said. “And – if there's any other inventions you think would be useful to the Police Divisions...”

Ryan smiled. “I'll expect a written proposal in my hand before I leave.”

Jess practically bounced in excitement and dragged a chattering Connor inside, Abby following at a more sedate pace.

Jess careened back out a few seconds later, nearly tripping Stephen up in her hurry to turn off the lights that were no longer needed.

They all moved inside as all Jess's lights sans one shut off with a dull clank.

None of them noticed the flickering light in the rose garden spring to life for a few seconds and then blink out of existence just as quickly.

The time was 3.05am.


End file.
